Today I had a phone call from a gentleman who wanted to see a ring made by one of the designers we feature. He had seen an ad picturing the ring and while he liked it, he felt he had to see it to see if it would be “the one”. He wants to become engaged to a young woman with simple tastes while he wants to make a statement. The ring in question, set with more than 100 small diamonds in addition to the primary gem, is technically difficult and expensive to make, so there will never be many of them. For this reason it looked to him as if it would meet his criteria; but that left open the question of whether or not she might like it. To resolve his doubts, he has made an appointment with me to come see the ring on a woman’s hand. Since a gift of jewelry is almost invariably a piece of communication (“I’m proud of you”, “I treasure you” “Will you marry me?”, and “I love you” being the most common) his concern is quite legitimate; but what makes it so hard for him to “make a statement”? Not, as yet, having met with him, I suspect the problem stems from his perception that a lot of jewelry is “the same old, same old”; and in fact, this is a constant problem in the jewelry business brought on by the difficulty of defending a copyright on an original design. Designers who have taken a “painterly” approach to design, that is, have crafted designs dependent on shape and the arrangement of gems, have found themselves copied since the late 19th century and the first appearance of a mass jewelry market; and it has frustrated many of them. Just take a look at Rene Lalique.Yes, he’s the Lalique of Lalique crystal; but in “belle époque” Paris you would have known him for his jewelry. By the early 1890s he’d become a sculptor, chemist, engineer, architect, jewelry designer and glassmaker; and his artistic credentials brought him into the most fashionable of social circles in Paris, that of actress Sarah Bernhardt. Perhaps a bit taken with Sarah, Lalique created elaborate “stage” jewelry for her; and perhaps unsurprisingly, the pieces he created for the actress soon gained him the patronage of the rich and socially prominent in Paris. Success in hand, he decided to make his exhibit at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair a design tour de force. At the apex of his creativity, he stunned visitors to the fair with his Art Nouveau extravagance. Richly fabricated from glass, precious metal and gems, the naturalistic imagery of his jewelry was filled with implicit emotional content that ranged from innocent to sinister – often commingled for dramatic effect. One corsage ornament he displayed was composed of wriggling and writhing snakes in a field of pearls; while other pieces in the display were complete landscapes in which life was contrasted with death and decay. In his jewelry the natural world became myth. The archetypical “languid maiden” of Art Nouveau, for example, transcended reality to become a mystical dragonfly or butterfly woman with a body of precious metal and wings of transparent “plique-a-jour” enamel. While other Parisian jewelers displayed their jewelry on black velvet, he showed his on a bronze screen outlining several fantastic butterfly women atop a field of white gauze. Parisian art critics hated it, calling his jewelry “eccentric, unwearable, mere showpieces”; but the public loved it and Lalique’s jewelry became a “must” for anyone who would be fashionable. His success, however, led to his work being widely copied, both in France and abroad. While each piece of Lalique’s jewelry was a technical masterpiece, crafted in an impulse to create a thing of beauty, the imitations were usually done on the cheap. Few of the copies had the depth of detail that marked Lalique’s work and fewer still displayed any artistic originality, but being less labor intensive and still “a la mode”, they sold very well at prices much lower than Lalique’s pieces of art. By 1909 he had seen enough theft of his intellectual property to tun his back on jewelry making forever and concentrated, instead, on glassmaking. Bereft of originality, flooded with increasingly crude jewelry, the public became bored with Art Nouveau jewelry and its motifs faded into a small, but interesting, back water of the jewelry world.

“Same old, same old”, doesn’t apply to Hearts On Fire diamonds. Each is crafted with that same impulse to beauty that drove Rene Lalique. How different this is from ordinary diamonds! Most of them are cut for weight, even those that are cut to imitate Hearts On Fire’s hearts and fire burst. Without Hearts On Fire’s optimal proportions (for brightness) and without Hearts On Fire’s polish (unequaled for its luster and transparency), they just don’t have the breathtaking beauty of the Hearts On Fire. It is so striking a diamond that it breathes myriad “sparkles” of fire by moonlight – when other diamonds have “fallen asleep”. So if you seriously want to make a statement, if you want to tell her how much she means to you and how much you love her in a way that all can see, only Hearts On Fire will serve. Check out our Hearts On Fire collection on line at hurstsberwynjewelers.com; then phone us at 708.788.0880 for an appointment to select your perfect statement of love and commitment. We’re Hursts’ Berwyn Jewelers and our pleasure is realizing your dreams.